


Halloween

by ProwlingThunder



Series: Soldier Boy [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Lack of Wolves, Missing Psychic Bond, Psychic Wolves, Psychic Wolves For Lupercalia, Wolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-16
Updated: 2013-05-16
Packaged: 2017-12-12 00:58:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/805305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProwlingThunder/pseuds/ProwlingThunder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He'd been a soldier, with a wolf by his side; at least, for one brief night on Halloween.</p><p>But then he was still the soldier. Just without his brother, and anything else that said he was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Halloween

**Author's Note:**

> Universes. I blame Lupercalia and the fest all over. All over! Because there are at least two more parts to this universe. Two! But this one is finished; sorry guys.

_“Should we be worried or something? It's Halloween...”_

_“Nothing ever happens on Halloween, Xander.”_

As the morning sun rose in the horizon Halloween day, Xander was fairly sure _nothing ever happens on Halloween_ would never be uttered again. Though he felt with a certainty that was and was-not his that it should have never been spoken in the first place, because _speak of the Devil and he shall appear_.

Which thankfully hadn't happened. They were all, in fact, still standing there watching the morning sunrise. The G-man too. Disturbingly Xander felt curiously proud of having worked with Angel last night, and just a little bit regretful that vampires couldn't _watch_ the sunrise. If anyone deserved a sunrise after having to put up with mid-century Buffy, Angel was one of them. 

Also Xander thought he would have been pretty pleased to see Angel poof into dust. _Buffy_ had only been in that predicament because she wanted to impress him. She wouldn't have been weak and frail otherwise. She would have been...

Well. Okay. Xander didn't know what she would have gone as if she hadn't of been a French noble-lady. He didn't know her that well, but he could have guessed some sort of badass, maybe a warrior princess if she was feeling delicate but probably an Amazon, or a Valkyrie, or a Gladiatrix, and he wasn't considering the latter just because Buffy would have looked hot in a loin cloth with a straight gladius sword and scutum shield in hand.

Xander had been playing some sort of soldier for years, ever since he was a boy. First as an Indian brave, _balancing on various porch rails with bow and arrow held at the ready, his fierce wolf-sibling prowling around below him_ , then as a Roman soldier, reused from a school play that same year, _eagle standard lost, lost lost lost, and he and his sister would never let that stand_ , and now he didn't have to pretend, he _was_ a soldier, he and his brother Aurore were doing exactly what the ancient direwolves and their brothers did, fighting enemies that hunted the unsuspecting populace, the fine line that was a barrier between this world and the next--

“Well,” Giles' voice stopped Xander's thoughts dead in their tracks, caught up as he was between the thrill of _doing his job_ and _besting Buffy_ and the sad realization that _Aurore hadn't been here for this_ with the fact that he very well _wasn't_ a wolf-brother. “You all must be very tired. Go round up your children and deliver them back home, then get some sleep. We'll discuss this tomorrow.”

That's right. He'd been chaperoning. Principal Snyder had volunteered him and his friends to show a bunch of kids around the city for trick-or-treating.

 _But I wasn't. We were patrolling for nasties._ And he knew he had been, despite it all, just as much as he knew he'd been playing babysitter. _Did we kill anyone? They're just kids..._ He remembered knocking a bunch of them out. He didn't think he'd shot anybody, and Aurore--

 _Aurore isn't here. Wasn't here._ So Aurore hadn't killed anyone either. That was good. Xander watched as Buffy and Cordelia and Giles all made to leave, and realized Willow wasn't there. Well, she'd been a ghost, she'd probably gone back to her own body, assuming the body was still alive to take her... Vampires and demons had been a staple of Halloween costumes for years. He called himself lucky, remembering the half-dozen little girls dressed as princesses he'd managed to stash when trick-or-treating their fathers' poker game, and all the unconscious not-monsters he'd left there with them. At least he knew where his group was.

He aught to help the others look for theirs. He didn't feel like it.

“Xander?”

Xander blinked and glanced at Giles, who'd stopped from where he had been following the girls and looked back at him from several paces up the road. The Giles he knew, looking not-worried even though he probably was, and it was disorienting to realize that he knew the Watcher even more then he aught to. He could see the outlines of a blade hidden under his sleeve, probably made of wood magicked into having the properties of metal without actually changing, and he knew that hidden in his pocket was a small two-bullet derringer with silver bullets, and in his other pocket was a vial of holy water and there was a hollow in the heel of his shoe where Giles stored about a hundred dollars of emergency cash on his person at all times.

It felt weird, to know all that. And to _want_ to call him Rupert and G-man at the same time, so that both addresses got tangled in his throat and all he could manage was a strangled “Ye—eah sir?” that really didn't sound like anything he'd say in either life.

Giles seemed to know that, because he gave him a strange look and a slight little frown. Xander squared his jaw. “Are you all right?”

 _No_ , he wanted to say. _Aurore isn't here, Miss Summers is alive, and Officer Chase is in a catsuit, Sir._ He didn't. He wanted to dig his fingers into his wolf-brother's ghost-gold nape, hear the reassuring litany of _here here mine_ in the space of his mind where Aurore aught to be, and wasn't. He settled with the solid weight of his gun, and the familiar feeling of his spare rounds, and the feeling of the knives hidden about his person and around his belt all in close reach.

None of it should have been real. None of it had been real, yesterday.

It was now. He clung to it. “Yes sir!”

Giles' frown deepened. Xander's world tilted. _Giles isn't an officer, don't treat him like one._ “Very well. Get your kids home. Get some sleep. I'll see you in the morning.”

Xander saluted him at the order. “Yes sir!”

Giles looked positively _troubled_.

Later, after delivering his group of misfit, potentially-traumatized children back to their respective parents and thanking the poker-fathers who's daughters had all been princesses for their help, Xander ducked past his own parents both _pass-out drunk_ and into his room. Instinct that wasn't his had him checking over his gun that hadn't been a gun yesterday and feeling both foolishly relieved and startlingly horrified to find it wasn't loaded _at all_.

Then he laid down to sleep, physically tired but emotionally exhausted, his door locked and a chair backed up under the knob.

Xander woke up in his closet, gun in hand, dreaming of Aurore's furry warmth draped protectively over his legs.

x-x-x

Going to school on the Day of the Dead was hard for Xander, and going to the library was even harder. Partly because the Day of the Dead post-Halloween Zombie Apocalypse was set to occur, and hadn't quite yet. In Sunnydale, there was always a consecration to lay dead soldiers to rest again, to lay disgruntled people back down in their graves. People in Hell's Wolfmount knew that. And after Halloween patrol, it was a day of rest and hanging out in the Graveyard bar, just reassuring themselves and their siblings that they were still alive.

People in _this_ Sunnydale apparently didn't know that. Because there wasn't anybody in the graveyard when he passed by it, just searching for the resurrectees who apparently also didn't know about the tradition.

Not all of it is the notorious lack of dead people in the cemetery, actually. Though Xander would have liked to _say_ it was, but really, he was proud by the size of it, if only because it was smaller than soldier-Xander had remembered.

...and that was the biggest problem, if he were honest. He had woken up _in his closet_ clutching his gun like a lifeline, still dressed like a soldier. Still dressed in his Halloween costume, no less. Like he was still playing a soldier he wasn't, still wishing for a wolf that didn't exist. A soldier that felt so very _real_ , with a lifetime of memories that felt just as real, and knowledge that twisted around in his mind, all of it ringing _true_ but _not happened_ and _not yet_ , memories of scenes and scents and people.

A soldier who knew Giles, who _had_ known Buffy, who kind of knew Willow, who did know Cordelia.

And Cordelia was part of the problem too. _Officer Chase._

Sunnydale Police Chief. World's ultimate hard-ass, no-nonsense cop.

She could have been a wolf-sister, if they still let women from Sunnydale try. Xander was sure a queen-bitch would probably pick her in a heartbeat. But the last time a woman had taken a wolf, it had been Dawnsister _Miss Summers_ and Xander did not want to think about that.

...he was pretty sure that, when he did finally arrive at the school to see Buffy and Willow and _Cordelia_ leaving the library, he stared at them.

He was also pretty sure there was no fooling Giles about it.

x-x-x-x

Giles did not chide him for showing up late, which was good only in that the other Xander was familiar with that sort of Giles. He does, however, sit Xander at the only empty table in the library, the others filled chest-high with books he was fairly sure had to do with Halloween, Janus, Transmutation, Magic or all of the above.

“Who were you last night?” Giles broke the silence, and Xander opened his mouth to respond and closed it at once, because Giles was busy pouring coffee into mugs, not tea, and he thought perhaps Giles knew more then he should.

The coffee was mule-kick strong, overpowering the lingering scents of Cordelia's perfume _ginger and mint, smells like Officer Chase's shampoo_ , and Xander breathed it in to try to chase away thoughts that were not but might-have-been his own. It was hot and thick, familiar in the same way the knife in his boot was familiar, even though Xander hadn't had either before last night.

It tasted good. He'd missed this, and he didn't know how or why Giles had known to make it. Giles drank _tea_ , orange or peppermint or sage, which was probably what the girls had drank and that made Xander very glad he'd missed out. 

But it helped steady his nerves a bit, drinking coffee across from Giles, the same way they'd _always_ spent their post-Halloween evenings, except that they _never had_. “A soldier,” Xander decided was a safe enough answer, and true, besides. Even if it probably wasn't exactly what Giles had been hoping for, but this was the Rupert Xander knew and not the one he remembered, and for the life of him he couldn't remember how he dealt with the man.

“Name, rank, and serial number.”

Private Alexander Harris rattled of his serial number and pack-name _Beta Auroresbrother_ like he'd done it a thousand times, and Xander snapped his mouth shut in a breath and stared at Giles, his whole world tilted. Giles sipped his coffee and said nothing for a heartbeat, letting Xander start to fidget before he nodded. “I thought so. A parallel world, then.”

A parallel world, it turned out, sometimes just _happened_. It took about three hours for Giles to find some medium between himself and the remembered Rupert for Xander's head to stop hurting, and when he did Xander wasn't sure it wasn't a conscious thing because he'd slipped up and called the man by his first name. But after coffee they didn't talk much, started browsing through books to find out anything they could on parallel universes even though Xander really didn't want to.

Buffy had a stack on French and France and history and high societal culture and Willow had a stack on ghosts and the afterlife and Cordelia had a stack loosely titled _what the hell is this anyway_.

Xander wasn't really sure what to put for his. Giles insisted books on parallel universes because he was _Giles_ , and if Aurore were here the wolf would just laugh.

_Aurore..._

“Ru-- er, Gi-- er--”

“Call me what you will, Xander.”

 _Wonderful._ But Xander was curious now, and his fingers kept reflexively trying to curl into a pelt that wasn't there. “Yes, sir. Do you have any books on direwolves?”

“Extinct animals, encyclopedia section.”

His heart sank to his toes.

_Oh._

_Of course._


End file.
